Full-text searching of data is becoming increasingly popular and significant in the computing world. For many years, the information-retrieval community has had to deal with the storage of documents and with the retrieval of documents based on one or more keywords. Since the burgeoning of the Internet and the feasibility of storing documents on-line, retrieval of documents based on keywords has become a complex problem. Conventional solutions to this problem typically involve the creation of an inverted index for searching documents. When contents of documents are updated, the corresponding index will be updated as well. However, there has been a lack of efficient ways to update the index without compromising the performance of the search engines.
In addition, when a search engine performs a full text search and a non-full text search such as a direct query search, in an object oriented computing environment, the objects returned from a conventional search engine would be different even though the objects are related to the same physical data entry in a database. As a result, an application that initiates the searches may have different views of the same data entry.